


The Game

by chainofclovers



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 17:07:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19114069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: “Well,” Frankie says, and Grace feels a swell of hope. The word sounds like a preamble to a specific request. “I’d like you to at least think about keeping your appointments.”





	The Game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellydash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellydash/gifts).



> Happy birthday, ellydash! You are wonderful, and I'm so grateful for your friendship.
> 
> Many thanks to bristler for a lovely beta read.
> 
> Ellydash sent me the following prompt not long after s5 came out, and I'm finally finished! 
> 
> _okay, my prompt is inspired by frankie telling grace in s5 she's scheduled for a big kiss on the mouth later. i'd love a little something with the premise that g &f really do start scheduling kisses with one another. at first, it's Just a Game, with brief kisses on the cheek, but of course, it escalates quickly…_

_And I know I've kissed you before, but I didn't do it right_  
_Can I try again, try again, try again_

—Mitski, “Pink in the Night”

.

THE DOUBLE DATE  
_April 2019_

The restaurant, all lofty ceilings and hard shiny surfaces, is full of the echoes of clanking silverware, sharp-pitched laughter rising to the rafters, loud but indistinguishable music with a thumping baseline. Everyone—which includes Grace and her friend Frankie and Frankie’s sister Teddie and Teddie’s friend Marnie, here for dessert and after-dinner drinks—has to yell a little to be heard. Grace mostly appreciates that Frankie keeps wanting to try to be friends with Teddie, but every sentence takes such effort, especially tonight. 

After a few drinks Grace takes a break in the quiet of the bathroom, though the dining room feels even louder when she reemerges. Unnoticed on her walk back to the table, Grace watches Frankie from across the room. The sight of Frankie’s arms flying around a story makes her smile. When she gets back, Frankie touches the middle of her back as she sits down, a warm spot in a cold room, and shouts—for Grace’s benefit, for something to say to Teddie and Marnie, to amuse herself, who knows—“The American divorcée returns!” She makes her sound like a character, someone with feminine wiles and a long cigarette holder.

“You’re American, Frankie,” Grace points out. “You’re divorced.”

Frankie tilts her head in patient acquiescence, a benevolent smile on her face, before turning to Marnie. “Grace is just coming off a fifty-four-day marriage to a zillionaire.” 

They’ve been here a couple hours, Grace wondering the whole time if her second divorce would come up. “We’re legally separated,” she clarifies. “The divorce will be final late summer.” She’d prefer not to go into the details, but she hates letting an inaccuracy stand even more than she hates an overshare. She’s got about four months remaining in California’s required six-month formal waiting period before a divorce can be finalized, but it’s over in all the ways that count. And Frankie’s right, because they tallied the days—there were fifty-four days of marriage before Grace filed for legal separation. 

“Wow,” Marnie says. Marnie’s bespectacled, with thick dark-rimmed glasses on a beaded chain. She wears a sweater constructed entirely from artful tufts of pink-dyed wool that would fit better in a textile museum than on a human body. She hasn’t talked about herself much, but Grace assumes she’s a weaver or quilter or textile artist. Marnie keeps refilling Teddie’s water glass from the carafe on the table, asking her if she wants another real drink, smiling at her like they’re on a date. Teddie doesn’t seem to notice. The Mengela sisters never notice anything. Or rather, they notice everything and diffuse, diffuse, diffuse. 

Grace shrugs at Marnie’s reaction. “The paperwork was about as much fun as it sounds.” 

_Paperwork_ —shorthand for a red-tape headache, sure, but Nick has paid for everything, even when it’s gone against his best interests. As it turns out, throwing lots of money at a divorce lawyer is as effective as throwing money at any other whim, and now it’s all over but the waiting. Nick’s rich enough to skip most lines, but not this one. Still, the parts they did control couldn’t have gone faster. Fast is how it goes when the person filing doesn’t want much of anything—not money, not property, not dignity, just a tenuous apologetic friendship she and Nick both know will be too painful to keep up. 

Grace hardly noticed the paperwork, anyway. The paperwork she did with Nick is nothing compared to the word-work she’s done with Frankie. 

“Well!” Marnie says brightly. “It certainly sounds like an interesting experience.” She looks at Teddie as if to indicate she expects her to chime in, but Teddie stays quiet, sets her face with the same faint smile she often wears. Teddie thinks of Grace and Frankie as hurricanes, as disasters, and herself as a gentle zephyr. “But I thought . . .” Marnie continues, frowning slightly. She glances back at Teddie; she can’t help herself, but she probably should. “I thought you two were, um—”

Grace’s stomach flutters. Frankie’s hand returns to Grace’s back. Helping. Not helping. “This enigma?” Frankie says with a laugh. “God bless America.” 

The conversation retreats to safer territory then: Teddie’s new semester, the appalling communal loom behavior at Marnie’s new studio (a weaver! she knew it!), the mildness of the weather. Before long, Frankie leans closer, whispers so that only Grace can hear—something the noise of the room allows her to do. “It’s almost nine.” Grace looks down at her phone. Frankie’s right. They make their excuses quickly, leave cash on the table, ignore the puzzled expressions on Teddie and Marnie’s faces. Frankie delights in the goodbye hugs; Grace tolerates hers. 

“Why’d you schedule us for nine when you knew we had plans tonight?” Grace asks when they’re in the car. Frankie’s driving: although her restricted license doesn’t exactly permit her to operate a moving vehicle at this hour, Grace is in no state, and this is preferable to leaving the car downtown overnight. 

Frankie grins. “Because there’s only so much Teddie I can take.” 

“Fair enough.” 

“We’re not going to make it home in time,” Frankie says when the clock in the car turns to 8:58. At 8:59, she exits Nautilus Street for a small residential side street, parks on the street in front of a dark house. “I’m blind, and you’re drunk,” she says. “Let’s not add ‘kissing while operating a moving vehicle’ to our repertoire.” 

“I’m not drunk,” Grace says, argumentative out of habit as much as anything else. She barely hears herself, can think only about the next minute.

“I know,” Frankie says amiably. “And I’m not blind. We’re just—a little impaired, you know?”

Grace wonders if she should unbuckle her seatbelt and move closer. There’s not much time to decide. She watches Frankie for implicit instruction: Frankie doesn’t unbuckle but grabs her lap belt and pulls to make a little extra room, shifts in the seat until she’s facing the center console, so Grace mirrors her movements. This is the hardest part, the moment right before, when the game feels surreal and fabricated and forced, maybe a mistake, maybe something that makes her look stupid, but then it’s nine o’clock and she leans in and Frankie leans in and their lips brush. It’s sweet, Grace thinks, the sweetness replacing the stupidity, and they have to kiss right now, in the car, because they promised each other, and—Frankie increases the pressure, moves her lips so they’re pressed against the corner of Grace’s mouth. “Mm,” Frankie says, and Grace hears herself gasp. She’s never heard Frankie make that sound, and it startled her, that’s why she reacted like that. It sounded like Frankie was—was _tasting_ her, and she still is, the soft press of her— 

Light floods the car. Grace jerks away, looks over her shoulder to find the source. There’s a lamp on in the front room of the formerly dark house and then a porch light. The front door opens, and a man emerges, which sets off a motion sensor bulb that makes everything even brighter. He must be wondering why a car with its lights on has parked in front of his house. “Frankie!” Grace cries. “Drive!”

Flustered, Frankie clamors to put the car in gear and speed away. “Oh my God,” she cackles, but Grace doesn’t join in her mirth. She folds her arms across her chest, looks out the window instead of at Frankie as they drive the short distance home. It would have been better to kiss five minutes late, the tardiness no one’s fault. She feels like a bad sport. This is exactly the kind of adventure Frankie deserves after—after everything, but it feels like they just got caught doing something bad, and that spoils it.

“Goodnight,” Grace says when they’re safely in the driveway and about to part ways, Grace to the house, Frankie to the studio. She reaches out, squeezes Frankie’s arm.

“My door’s always open,” Frankie says, and Grace can’t identify the expression on her face.

.

THE FIRST DAY  
_December 2018_

The word-work starts on the beach the morning after the wedding, perched on one knee beside Frankie, horrified at herself, frozen but wanting to reach out. Frankie never—not that morning, not any other—asks Grace what propelled her out of Nick’s bed early in the morning, back to La Jolla alone with a blanket and a flask. Probably because she understands without asking that it was the only thing to do. 

It hurts to kneel, but she keeps kneeling, knowing every minute she stays in that position will translate to painful stiffness later. She stays where she is, and so does Frankie, and she alternates between looking at Frankie’s devastated face and the choppy ocean. 

Grace breaks the wave-rushed silence first. “Your cake was beautiful,” she says. “I watched them cut it, and I’m so sorry—”

“Cake-yata.” 

“Cake-yata. Yes. It was perfect. I should’ve known.”

“It _was_ perfect.”

“What if I’d never bought the other cake?”

Frankie huffs a humorless laugh. “What if I’d used words on the Post-It notes?” 

“What if I hadn’t gone to the Maldives?”

“What if I hadn’t posted the second video?”

“What if I hadn’t posted the first one?”

The ocean blurs when they get far enough back in time for Frankie’s “What if I’d ignored Leo and come to find you in the woods?” and Grace’s “What if we’d talked to Babe together?” and Frankie’s “Oh my God, what if we _had_ talked to Babe together?” Grace’s heart aches as she imagines Frankie arriving at the tail end of her conversation with Babe to sit on the log with them, then walking next to her the whole way back to the cabin after Babe vanished, the remains of the pint of toilet gin heavy in the pocket of Grace’s burlap robe. They’d have sat together on the narrow bottom bunk, talking until they started to fall asleep against each other’s shoulders. It was cold in the woods, and while the cabin wasn’t much better, in her imagination it’s warm and snug, and she wants it.

They count the days of word-work—the days of Grace and Nick’s marriage—with tally marks on Frankie’s whiteboard; it takes fifty-three days to take their What Ifs back to the first days of their acquaintance. (“What if I hadn’t teased you about SlimFast?” “What if I’d followed you into the kitchen at the Christmas party?” “What if I’d kept my shirt down?” “What if I’d answered when you asked me my sign?”)

They’ve already imagined what their lives would have been like without living together; it’s something else entirely to imagine and reimagine what had actually happened. To unspool every misstep, to free themselves from those threads. Where they can, they make amends. Private ones, mostly, forgivenesses accumulating at the kitchen island and the easel and the edge of the sea, though the tweet they compose together early in the What If process is as public as it gets:

> We’re sorry. We were high. Or something. We love you. Use this code for 20% off online orders now through February 14: everydayisnationalvibratorday20

It’s not a thing, Grace is pretty sure, but for the first time ever she has a favorite tweet. 

.

THE FIFTY-FOURTH DAY  
_February 2019_

Grace turns the overwhelming entertainment system remote around and around in her hand. She’s supposed to use this thing to pick something for her and Nick to watch, but even after several lessons, she doesn’t really understand how it works, and she’d prefer not to have to ask.

“Everything all right, babe?”

Nick’s question is multi-level. She could keep her answer on the surface: _All right, I give. Show me the fucking menu button_. Or she could answer the real question, and if she does that, she won’t have to learn how to use the entertainment system, or pick a movie, or sit through it and pretend she’s entirely here. 

Grace sighs. “I don’t know. I can never spend enough time with either of you.”

“It’s an adjustment.” Nick removes his feet from their perch on the coffee table and scoots a little closer to Grace on the big leather couch. “That’s okay.” 

Grace searches for Nick’s eyes. She realizes this is the last moment before she changes things, before she instills permanent hurt. “Yes, but—but when I married you, I thought Frankie and I were over.” 

Hurt flashes across Nick’s face, a cringe briefly contorting his always bright, always amused features. “If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “I love being your husband. What you just said doesn’t change that.”

Nick is supposed to be safe. A little unreal, like drunkenness, like vacation. He’s supposed to open a bottle of wine, whisk her away to a foreign country on a private plane, encourage her to seek a profit. He’s supposed to keep her from being alone, but now that they’re together Grace has realized how not-alone she already was. And how real Nick is, unsafe in his hopes and expectations and love. He’s dissolved all the distances between them, and now he’s too close. “Robert didn’t want to be my husband,” Grace says. She’d given Robert as good as she got: inertia, party dresses. She’d had the space to not want to be his wife, and the space to bury that lack inside the dull ease she did want. Because she was different then, visionless and small. “But you do.”

“Yeah. I do.”

That’s why she married Nick, Grace knows. Because it was too terrifying to turn down her only remaining opportunity to be wanted. Her voice shakes: “I spent eight hours with Frankie today. You left for work, and I left for the beach house.”

Nick knows she sees Frankie, knows they’re mending things, knows they’re friends again and that this is important, that they absolutely have to stay friends. But he doesn’t know about eight whole hours, and not just today but many days. Sometimes Frankie doesn’t make coffee when she gets up in the morning because she likes Grace’s coffee better and Grace will show up soon enough. And sometimes Grace doesn’t have any coffee at Nick’s because she’d prefer the joy of the first cup to happen at the beach house. Every morning, she picks at breakfast because in only an hour Frankie’s going to make her toast while she gets the coffee going. Nick doesn’t seem to worry when she stacks her barely-touched plate on the counter, but Frankie worries out loud if she doesn’t eat the toast. Frankie’s started hugging her when she arrives—they’ve mended enough to hug again, for it to feel natural again—and it hurts, getting hit with that _welcome home_ feeling every time she walks in the door. She’s only ever home in such temporary ways, and she doesn’t want home to be a place she can only visit. She wraps up her Vybrant work and her time with Frankie so she can be back at the penthouse before Nick comes home, and it’s always hard to leave.

“Did something happen?” Nick asks. Grace frowns, confused, and Nick clocks the confusion and echoes it in his own expression. “Never mind,” he says. 

“I don’t know what I want,” Grace says. The words are untrue the second she says them. She wants to go home. She says so, and it’s different from all the other times she’s pushed Nick away, or hid from him, or changed her mind a dozen times a day, begging him to leave her alone, begging him to let her back in. It’s final. 

.

THE APPOINTMENT  
_February 2019_

Grace pours coffee in Frankie’s mug, then her own, puts the coffee pot back in the coffeemaker, and sits next to Frankie at the kitchen island. Frankie’s too quiet this morning, distant, and Grace’s first sip tastes bitter.

Four days ago, she filed for legal separation from Nick, turned what would have been the fifty-fifth day of their marriage into the first day of their divorce. But before moving her belongings back to the beach house, Grace realized she needed to ask Frankie’s permission to come home. That afternoon, they’d sat together in their Adirondack chairs listening to the ocean fold over itself and into itself with gentle slaps. Grace offered her hand, some version of a connection that had happened so many times, often in these very chairs. Frankie didn’t take it. 

“I want to come back,” Grace said. “For good. No more penthouses, no more Santa Fe, no more leaving.” 

“Ever?” Two brittle syllables.

“Ever.” 

Frankie took her hand. “This is your home,” she said. “Of course you’re coming back. Especially if—”

“If what?”

“If we’re both done with other—with the other nonsense.” 

“No more boyfriends.” That’s what they were agreeing to, wasn’t it? 

Frankie looked stricken, like she hadn’t expected Grace to say it in words. “I think so,” she said.

Some stupid part of Grace hoped then that doing the right thing would heal Frankie. If she could make Frankie believe the truth that she was done with Nick, that she was home for good, they’d be mended.

And Frankie does believe it. If she didn’t, Grace’s time back home wouldn’t have been nearly as good. She’s sat through _The Goonies_ twice. They’ve sold a bunch of vibrators. They’ve smoked pot on the patio almost every night. Grace can breathe again: the relief of one home, the relief of no more what ifs. 

But Frankie keeps sinking into silences. Sitting here drinking coffee in their sunburst of a kitchen on the type of perfect morning that causes people to move to San Diego, it’s obvious Frankie won’t get over Grace’s marriage to Nick for a long time. She’ll need to keep thinking about it, talking about it, processing it, keep making it relevant to conversations about a thousand other things. She’ll need to make jokes about it, let the jokes shave off the little bits that don’t hurt anymore until the painful remains are small enough to put away for good. There isn’t a what if that can erase the fact of what happened. Even an actual divorce can’t do that.

“What can I do?” Grace asks, sliding her mug along the counter, passing it from hand to hand. The question might be futile, but she has to ask. 

“Well,” Frankie says, and Grace feels a swell of hope. The word sounds like a preamble to a specific request. “I’d like you to at least think about keeping your appointments.”

“What?” She always keeps her appointments. She hasn’t had many, lately: Vybrant pop-ups, the occasional doctor visit, the very occasional lunch with a friend or with her daughters, and now a few legal obligations because of the divorce.

Before she can ask what Frankie means, it dawns on her: she hasn’t looked at her planner for the past few days. Everything she’s needed to do has been in her head. This is unlike her—she writes things down, likes to be busy, likes a full agenda. But she hasn’t had any energy for anything but the essentials. She hasn’t needed written instructions to remember where she’s supposed to be.

After breakfast is over, she goes upstairs. Her planner’s sat untouched on her nightstand since she moved back home. It’s still open to the day she came back. She flips through each page between the day she’d left off and the current day. Twice in the past three days, Frankie’s scrawled “Kiss Frankie Bergstein” and doodled a pair of expressive lips. Without realizing it, Grace has missed a kiss on Thursday at three p.m. and another on Friday at ten in the morning. The kisses are written in two different pens. After missing Thursday, maybe Frankie snuck back up here and added a second chance.

Today is Saturday. Nothing’s scheduled. This isn’t, Grace reminds herself, a disappointment. She flips through the week ahead, knowing she has a doctor appointment next Wednesday and nothing else that she’s consciously planned for. She’s right about the appointment on Wednesday—except before she gets there she sees she’s also got “Kiss Frankie Bergstein” written in a third ink color at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. 

For the first time since the day it happened, she thinks about a moment with Frankie months earlier, just before everything fell apart, or maybe when everything already was. _You’re scheduled for a big kiss on the mouth later._ Grace had smiled, rolled her eyes, thought little of it. She’d looked at her planner later that afternoon, certain Frankie was far away, and there wasn’t anything kiss-related written down. Frankie really had penciled herself in to Grace’s life plenty of times before, but Grace wasn’t surprised she hadn’t actually scheduled a kiss back then. Those little flirtatious comments were always jokes, and they always hinged on Grace’s assumed disinterest in taking her up on the offer. Frankie never learned: even when Grace rose to the occasion, surprised Frankie back, hinted at or outright stated truths from a distant past, Frankie played the same game, stuck to the same rules. 

This feels a little different. Until their conversation this morning, Frankie has never followed through on her outlandish suggestions. She’s never looked Grace in the eye and asked her in all seriousness to meet her there. But even with this planner dotted with appointments Grace now knows Frankie wants her to keep, Grace is certain this is a game. It’s a game not without benefits—Grace likes the idea of being able to show up and say, in not so many words, _I’m staying, and here’s the kiss to prove it_. But these kisses—if they happen—will be cheek kisses or promise-kisses on the forehead to go with the verbal promise Grace made on the beach four days ago and left unsealed. It’s nothing Grace can’t handle. She wants to seal it. She’s already said she wants to stay. 

The next day, Grace wakes up nervous and is annoyed with herself for feeling that way. She had trouble falling asleep the night before, kept wondering what would happen if she looked for Frankie in the morning and Frankie evaded her. She tells herself for the hundredth time that she has no reason to worry. There’s nothing new about this game, and it’s not even the first time she had a best friend who wanted to play like this. She wasn’t joking when she told Frankie she’d kissed a girl—she learned to kiss at fourteen, allowing a classmate who was also a neighbor to practice on her in the strange sunny hours between school letting out and nighttime. That had been a game. Just a game, too focused on the end goal of impressing a boy to think too much about the route to get there. And in college, the year Janice was her roommate, Janice dated boys and so did she, but sometimes, on a rare Saturday night when neither had a date, they’d stay in and drink pilfered whiskey until their edges blurred enough to kiss. Just for fun. Just a game, too drunk to remember the next day if it had felt good. Almost too drunk, Grace amends now, a lifetime later. Because it did feel good, as she told Frankie that night they squatted in the beach house. 

Grace stretches getting ready into a longer span of time than usual. She doesn’t want to head downstairs before nine. When it’s nine on the dot and she’s halfway down the stairs, Frankie comes into view. She sits at the dining room table typing on her laptop. “Hello,” Grace says when she reaches the last step on the staircase into the dining room. 

Frankie looks up at the sound of Grace’s voice, surprise on her face. “Hi.”

This is early for Frankie to be dressed and ready for the day. She’s making an effort too, though her surprised expression is a little audacious. Didn’t Grace ask her what she could do? Hasn’t she begged Frankie to act like they mattered, and seen the disastrous results when she herself didn’t?

“I’m here for my appointment.” Grace’s cheeks flame. “So how’s this supposed to work?”

“Calm down, Mrs. Skolka,” Frankie says as she stands. “I’m getting there.”

“Hey, I didn’t take his name and you know it.” For weeks now, they’ve both apologized and apologized, forgiven and forgiven. And Grace knows she’s the one who ought to feel truly repentant. She’s the one who left this time, and it may take Frankie even longer to recover than it took Grace when Frankie came home from Santa Fe. But now she’s mad, and it’s a new anger: the anger of being teased for something she didn’t do. 

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

“And my big feminist prize for not taking it? I get to keep Robert’s instead. Which you wouldn’t know anything about, would you, Mrs. Bergstein?” 

“Grace Pauline. Come here.”

But Frankie doesn’t make Grace move anywhere. She walks towards her, stands next to her at the bottom of the stairs, reaches out and tucks Grace’s hair behind her ear. Grace is faintly aware that Frankie’s changed the game, has turned “Kiss Frankie Bergstein” into “Receive a kiss from Frankie Bergstein.” Frankie leans closer, and Grace’s anger is only just fading, and isn’t replaced with anything yet, not nervousness or amusement or frustration or interest, and Frankie’s lips land against her cheeks. Frankie doesn’t linger; she kisses her firmly, then pulls away just as decisively. It feels—intentional. Neutral, which isn’t nothing but is pretty close. 

They look at each other. “Um,” Frankie says. “I have a face too.” 

Grace rolls her eyes, but she squares her shoulders so they’re perpendicular to Frankie’s again. Frankie’s tied her hair back with a bandana rolled into a headband, so there isn’t any hair covering her cheek. Grace mimics Frankie’s gesture anyway, running the tip of her index finger across Frankie’s cheek to the top of her ear. Across the place she’s about to kiss. She leans in, brushes her lips against the fullest part of Frankie’s cheek. The muscles in Frankie’s cheek shift beneath her lips. She pulls away in time to see Frankie grin.

“Okay then,” Grace says. 

“Until next time,” says Frankie. “Check your planner.” 

.

THE PAINT  
_February 2019_

“I’m just looking for now,” Grace says when the young woman at the makeup counter asks her if she needs help with the lipsticks. 

“You can try on anything when you’re ready,” the clerk replies. “Just let me know.” 

The woman’s demeanor is just this side of pushy. Grace had thought about this possibility before she left for the department store, had considered ordering something online. But she wanted to go to a makeup counter, walk the aisle and choose from tangible options, come home with something today. There’s something clarifying about being out in the world, the buzz of your thoughts a train track parallel to your actions. At the park or a grocery store or a makeup counter, as Grace walks or shops or browses, she’s free to think about the kids, the divorce, the business. Free to think about anything at all, and she stands in front of the lipstick and thinks about the game.

When Frankie writes “Kiss Frankie Bergstein” in Grace’s planner, she draws lips. She’s started coloring them in with marker, and she must have tons of dozen different shades of red and pink to choose from because the lips always look a little different. She surrounds them with “x”s, the kiss part of “xo,” and accents the little letters with whatever she’s using for the current lip color. 

Frankie doesn’t have a planner. She says she simply goes where the universe wants her to go, but it’s not the whole story. Instead of a datebook, she uses Google Calendar on her phone, an unmagical but useful way to fulfill the universe’s more practical obligations. After a week spent at the mercy of the entries Frankie makes in her planner, Grace started to use a hot pink post-it notes to do a little scheduling of her own. She doesn’t add illustrations or write her full name—she scrawls a date and a time and sticks the post-it to the screen of Frankie’s phone. She supposes she could send Google invites, since she looks at Frankie’s shared calendar to see if she’s free, but she likes this better. It’s the difference between shopping at a counter and buying lipstick online.

They’ve never had to reschedule a kiss. Neither has ever turned down an invitation. They always show up in the kitchen or the dining room or some other nearby common space at the right time. They make themselves easy to find. It doesn’t feel like nothing when they kiss each other’s cheeks. It feels tangible, if bounded, something brief but big. Ordinary moment after ordinary moment, and then a ruby flare. 

And while Grace isn’t an artist, she’s gone through enough post-it notes in the last couple weeks to have their color on her mind. There are at least forty lipsticks from this brand alone, and she wants something bright but not garish, something with deep pigmentation. Red (classic) or pink (like the post-its)? She runs her index finger against the smooth plastic knobs of color, lands on a raspberry that seems to have undertones of orange instead of blue, a slight shimmer. Unless the plastic’s lying. She glances at the clerk, gets her attention the second she looks up. “I’d like to try this one on.” 

The clerk adjusts the mirror, pulls the sample tube from the back of the display. “Shall I?”

“I’ll do it, please.” Grace applies the lipstick with two steady strokes. It’s the right color: darker than she usually wears. Warm. She smiles at herself in the mirror, only slightly. 

“It looks great,” the clerk says, handing Grace a blotter paper so she can get rid of the excess. It’s a genuine compliment, not just something to say to make a sale. “A lot of women your age—a lot of women shy away from anything that bright.” 

Frankie wears bright clothes, paints with bright paint. Grace thinks of her face, far away then close up, the smooth skin at her cheekbone. The bright lipstick print blooming there. She’ll have one chance to get it right. “I’ll take it.” 

“Shopping for a special occasion?” the saleswoman asks as she runs Grace’s card. 

“Sort of,” Grace says, and glances to the side as if too distracted to be able to handle any follow-ups. 

“Too bad you missed Valentine’s Day. This really is a great color.”

“Mm.” She didn’t kiss Frankie on Valentine’s Day. She’d thought about scheduling her, but it seemed too pointed, too obvious. When no kisses appeared in her planner either, she assumed Frankie felt the same. They watched a movie instead, and ate ice cream from a pint, the old boyfriendless cliché. 

The clerk hands the card back and passes her a slim seafoam shopping bag. She smiles again. “Enjoy.” 

As soon as Grace gets back to the car, she pulls a makeup remover wipe from her purse, rubs it across her lips until the mirror on the sun visor confirms their return to their natural paler shade. Frankie’s watching Faith, and Grace is supposed to pick her up and take her to lunch in a little while, but Frankie can’t see the new lipstick until later. The smear of color is different on the makeup wipe—brighter, wetter. She folds the wipe into a small square and places it in one of the small inner pockets of her purse, finds a more subtle lip gloss and adds back a little color. 

At lunch, Frankie gives Grace a rundown of all of Faith’s new skills. She can moo like a cow, though the sound doesn’t often correlate with anything cow-related happening nearby. She can use the coffee table to pull herself up, and she can let go to stand unaided for as long as she doesn’t realize that’s what she’s doing—as soon as she notices, she thuds to the floor. She bounces to music in Frankie’s arms, giggles at key changes. Giggles at Frankie’s moves, Grace bets.

Some other time, she might find Frankie long-winded on the topic. But today she’s grateful for Frankie’s talkativeness, content to sit back with her salad and listen. She wonders if Frankie’s thinking about the game, and about how they’re playing it later today, how they’re going to go home and pack up a bunch of vibrators and cap off the afternoon with kissing. 

Late that afternoon, when it’s time to kiss, they’re both at the table. This is unusual—they nearly always engineer it so the invited has to arrive from another room. Has to show up. But today they’re both right here. Grace gets up from the table, reaches for her purse, finds her compact mirror and the new lipstick. 

Frankie stands too. “Grace, it’s ti—oh.” 

Frankie watches her uncap the lipstick, open the mirror, look at herself, paint her lips. She adds a few coats, taking care to keep to the lines of her lips even though she’s putting on more than usual. She doesn’t blot the excess. 

“That color.”

“You’re always drawing in my datebook,” Grace says. “You’re always leaving a mark.” Heat in her cheeks, but she wants to cool down, wants to control this. She stands. “Come here.”

When Frankie’s close enough, Grace takes her shoulder. One chance. She presses her lips to Frankie’s cheek, the pressure firm. She’s kept her lips more parted than usual, to get the classic shape for the print, and for the first time thinks about how easy it would be to slip open and press her tongue against Frankie’s skin. She doesn’t ask to think this; the thought seems to emerge from her tongue. She pulls away carefully. The print is perfect. It could be pop art. 

Frankie doesn’t reciprocate the kiss. She stands unmoored, starts to raise two fingers to her cheeks.

“No!” Grace exclaims. “You’ll smudge it.” 

“Take my picture, then. I want to see it.” Touching wouldn’t have revealed to Frankie the shape of Grace’s mouth on her skin. A mirror could, but Frankie’s frozen where she is. “My phone’s around here somewhere.”

“We’ll use mine,” Grace says, hoping not to sound frantic. “The camera’s better.” 

There’s no suspiciousness in Frankie’s face when Grace holds up the camera, looks at her through the screen. She snaps a couple photos head on, the lipstick print visible but only part of the focus. Instead of asking Frankie to turn her head, Grace steps until she’s got a profile shot and takes a few more photos from that angle. She looks at the pictures before the moment passes, because if the ones she’s taken aren’t sharp enough, if they don’t frame Frankie’s face well, she’ll have to take more. Luckily, there are a couple good ones from both perspectives. “Wanna see?” Grace asks. 

Frankie shakes her head no, even though she was eager to see the print just seconds earlier. “Send them to me later.”

Grace sets her phone on the table, and Frankie stands in front of her. She reaches out and touches Grace’s bottom lip with her thumb. “It’s a beautiful color,” Frankie says. “You should wear this lipstick a lot.” 

“Okay.” The word brushes against Frankie’s thumb.

Frankie pulls away, holds up her thumb to reveal a deep pink bloom on the skin. 

“Your cheek will stain,” Grace says later, when they’re cooking dinner and Frankie still hasn’t washed her face. 

“I’ve had worse.” 

Still, Grace finds another makeup remover wipe in her bag. She holds it up so Frankie can see what she’s doing, then wipes Frankie’s cheek. The pigment wants to cling to the skin, but it gives up soon enough. 

“Kiss my cheek?” Frankie says. 

Grace laughs nervously. They’ve never kissed unplanned before. “A vicious cycle.” But when she kisses Frankie this time, the lipstick on her lips is dry and doesn’t leave a mark. 

.

THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY  
_March 2019_

Grace pushes her laptop away from her and slides her martini closer, but the drink is hardly a comfort. Just yesterday, she spent over an hour building out a dozen custom metrics for the Vybrant website. She thought she saved each report properly, but today they’re nowhere to be found. The Analytics page is full of the same standard charts she’s been looking at for over a year. 

Frankie walks into the kitchen wearing her I Am Harriet shirt and a long paisley skirt. Grace instinctively looks up. 

“No worries,” Frankie says, pointing at her chest, then at the ceiling. “The new bathtub is rad, and it’s definitely staying put.” She frowns. “Hey. What’s the matter?”

“I lost my custom metrics.”

“Oh.” Frankie’s expression says it all: she has no idea what Grace is talking about. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Grace takes a sip of her drink. “Yeah, well, I worked really hard on them. This is so different than the early years of Say Grace, especially now that we’ve got help with order fulfilments. Back then, I had a garage full of moisturizer, a stack of P&L statements, and I kept the budget with a ledger and pen, and now—” She gestures at her computer. “It feels more abstract, if you let it, even though it really isn’t abstract at all.” 

“Very sage.” 

Grace huffs. In the old days, that would be enough to close the door on the conversation. She’d return to her laptop and diligently redo the lost work, and Frankie would wander away. But today Frankie stands close to where Grace sits and rests a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you lost your work,” Frankie says. She nudges at Grace’s side with her own. “Really.”

“Thanks. I hate redoing things I’ve already done.”

“Can I take your mind off of it?” Frankie invades even more of her personal space. “It’s 8:30 somewhere.”

“It literally isn’t, Frankie. It’s a quarter past the hour everywhere in the world.” Grace was surprised when Frankie scheduled a kiss for 8:30 p.m. on a Friday. They’ve never scheduled the game so late before. 8:30 is date territory, and the game is almost the opposite of dating. 

“Whatever you say, Grace. We can do it again at actual 8:30. But for now, you’ve, um, lost some very important metrics, and I wanna cheer you up.” 

Grace warms. “Okay.” 

Frankie leans closer, grips her shoulder tighter, and Grace isn’t thinking, or doesn’t think she’s thinking, when she turns her head to look at Frankie’s eyes for the first time since she walked into the kitchen. In hindsight, it’s inevitable that their lips meet. It’s what happens if you try to look into the eyes of the person who’s trying to kiss you on the cheek. Their lips meet briefly, the kiss almost entirely the friction of staying in motion.

“Oh, hey,” Frankie says, staggering backward a little. She doesn’t say anything else right away, and Grace is back in college. Janice is sick, really sick, and it’s a Saturday, and Grace breaks her date to heat up Campbell’s on a hot plate and deliver it to Janice in bed on a stolen cafeteria tray she’s kept with her since sledding freshman year. _You’re a doll, Grace, thanks_ , Janice says, and she’s all pink and flushed and steam rises from the soup in little billows, and Grace kisses her, not caring about germs, because it’s a Saturday and it’s just the two of them, and she’s not thinking. And Janice ducks away, sloshes soup on her comforter. _What the hell are you doing?_ Grace realizes, then, that they’re sober this time. That Janice hasn’t wanted to remember the other nights, the liquored-up fever of them. Grace leaves, wanders around in the cold until she’s sure Janice is asleep or can pretend to be, and they never kiss again, and never talk about kissing.

But this is Frankie. Frankie, for whom Grace once broke a date so she could take her on a hot air balloon ride. Frankie smiles, and Grace is older again, safe again. “That was unexpected,” Frankie says. “But I can’t remember why?”

.

THE SLEEP  
_April 2019_

Grace can’t sleep. She keeps replaying the evening: _the American divorcée. This enigma_. The kiss, the porch light, the speeding away.

 _My door’s always open_.

She’s a curious person. When she gets close to the end of a good book, she has to make the time to finish right then, even at the expense of other tasks. She has to. With the same curiosity, she gets out of bed, shrugs her pink silk robe over her shoulders, slides her feet into the slippers that seem to be waiting for a walk. It’s late, and she doesn’t check the time. This game they’re playing—it’s Frankie’s game, Frankie’s idea. Frankie still seems surprised every time Grace rises to the occasion. Isn’t surprising Frankie how Grace wins?

The cool air outside wakes her up from a sleepiness she hadn’t noticed. The scuff of the slippers against the pavement, against the stairs. The crash of the waves against the sand. The creak of the doorknob. Grace holds her breath as she approaches Frankie’s bed, afraid of scaring her instead of surprising her. 

“Grace?” The muffled sound emerges from a pile of blankets.

“Hey.”

The pile shifts, and Frankie sits up, still nested in the covers. Grace feels the same magnetic pull she felt when she imagined Frankie finding her in the woods and bringing her back to the cabin. She wants a blanket and a body inviting her to sleep. _Get warm, rest here, you’ve come to the right place_. Frankie reaches for something on the nightstand: a jar candle, which Grace can see only when Frankie strikes a match and lights it. The bright flare of the match illuminates her curious smile and braided hair, then the candle does, but more faintly. “What are you doing here?”

Panic teases Grace’s stomach. Maybe she could pretend she was sleepwalking and took a wrong turn. But she doesn’t win that way. “You said that thing about your door.”

“Oh. Right. So I did.” Frankie puts the lit candle back on the nightstand and moves her arms in a flailing breaststroke to push some of the covers out of the way. “There isn’t an invitation coming in the mail,” she says when Grace fails to move closer. Frankie lies back down and pats the bed, a bit like the motion of coaxing a well-trained dog onto the furniture, telling them it’s really okay to jump up. Grace shrugs off her robe and sets it down on a chair, steps out of her slippers, lets the pull take her in.

Grace has dismissively noticed the chaos of Frankie’s bed before. She likes hospital corners and restful patterns and a firm mattress. But it doesn’t feel chaotic when she climbs into bed and lies on her back; it feels soft, only soft. Frankie pulls the covers over them, and the timeworn sheets are so gentle, and there’s a certain understandable order to the heavy embrace of the blankets, which feel not tangled but stacked. “Oh my gosh, little popsicle!” Frankie exclaims when their arms brush. “No wonder you’re here. You were hypothermic.” 

“I’m just a little cold.” 

“Okay, without touching any of your icy skin to mine, scoot toward me.”

Grace complies, inch by inch, and when she’s close enough, Frankie drapes an arm across her waist, tilts her head against Grace’s shoulder. Grace closes her eyes. She’s glad she didn’t check the time—this moment is hourless now, warm and soft, heavy but easy. Unbound, like it belongs neither to the day that’s ended or the day about to arrive. Grace is almost asleep when she remembers the candle. “Frankie!” she hisses, wide awake again. “We can’t sleep with an open flame.”

“It’s in a jar,” Frankie murmurs. “Totally safe.” 

Grace extracts herself from Frankie’s grip. She sits up so she can lean over Frankie and blow the candle out. Briefly, the smoke is opaque enough to be visible in the dark. When she lies back down, Frankie rolls closer and touches her again, almost but not quite before Grace has the chance to wonder if she will: the relief of a tiny question with a tiny answer. 

.

THE WAKE-UP  
_April 2019_

Grace wakes up several times throughout the night, but she never startles into full consciousness. She drifts halfway into wakefulness, pushes the covers down if she’s too hot or pulls them back around her if she’s cold again, remembers Frankie, remembers where she is, goes back under. Finally, she wakes up and it’s light in the room, with a grey tint that suggests an overcast morning. She’s on her side, Frankie spooned up behind her. She stretches a little, just enough to elongate her torso and feel satisfying tension in her shoulders, and Frankie stirs. 

“It’s Sunday,” Frankie says. She finds Grace’s hand, runs their fingers together. 

“And?” The pressure on her hand feels good.

“And we can do whatever we want.” 

Frankie’s words are supposed to be expansive. There’s imagination in her “whatever,” the energy of anything. Seconds ago, Grace had the happiness of being sleepy and not-lonely and warm, but now Frankie’s made the day ahead into something bigger than this moment, and it makes Grace sad. “Yeah,” Grace says.

Frankie doesn’t miss the pinched syllable. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Grace says. She rotates in Frankie’s grip and lies on her back, Frankie’s arm still around her, Frankie’s hand still playing with hers. “Well. I was just thinking about what we gave up. To—to get here.” 

Frankie stiffens. “Gave up?”

“I miss sex,” Grace says. “It’s a grey day, and there’s nowhere to be, and you spend the morning or the afternoon in bed, and he—he pays attention to you, makes you feel good. We’ve given that up, and it’s okay, because this is more important, but—”

“I pay attention to you.” 

Grace smiles. “Not like that.” 

“Do you want to sleep with Nick again?” Frankie asks. “Because I slept with an ex, you know, my ex-husband, Sol Bergstein, bisexual queen of denial Sol Bergstein, and let me tell you, I don’t recommend inviting in all that confusion.” 

“Don’t worry, there’s no chance of me sleeping with Nick again.” Grace sighs. “He just—he wanted me, you know? And I appreciated that. And I’m very aware that I walked away from being wanted in that particular way.”

“Grace?” 

“Yes?”

“Do you think about the game when we’re not playing it?”

“Oh,” Grace says. “You call it that too.” 

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” Grace says. “I think about it a lot. Do you?”

“All the time.” Frankie fidgets. “What does it feel like?”

“To think about the game?”

“No, to play it.”

“I don’t know.” Grace said these words to Nick too, when she claimed not to know what she wanted, and as soon as she’d said it, she knew. It happens again, _I don’t know_ a way to purchase the time it takes to bring the real answer to the surface. “I like the game. It feels good, it—what about for you?”

Frankie looks away. “I really like it. It feels really good.”

“But this relationship doesn’t have sex in it.”

“Well—”

“You’ve made that very clear.”

“When?”

Grace sighs, exasperated. “When we were squatting, and we had our sleepover. You said no very, very clearly.” 

“I did?”

“Yes! Don’t misremember your way out of this. You said no, and while I wasn’t asking you to have sex with me, I was asking if you _wanted_ to, and—” She pauses. “And I’m not going to repeat what happened with Janice. What I did to Janice.” 

“You never told me how that ended.” 

“I know. It ended because I messed up the rules of the game.”

“The game.” 

“Yeah. She wanted drunk and forgettable, and I kissed her sober, because I wanted to, I guess, surprise surprise, and then _I_ tried to forget about it for half a fucking century. Because she didn’t want me.”

“No, she did,” Frankie says. “She was scared.”

Grace doesn’t respond. The hopelessness of the sexless whatever lifts, replaced by something very specific, which she feels in pinpricks.

“A scared person might turn down something she wants. A scared person might botch the answer to a very good question.” 

“Which game are we talking about now?”

“No game.” Frankie sighs. “I shouldn’t have said no. Okay? We’d just tried to go to Nick’s, and I didn’t even know about you and those girls, you and Janice. I didn’t give you the real answer. I wish I’d been brave enough, but I wasn’t.”

Grace wants to get a clear look at Frankie. She adjusts Frankie’s arm away from her and sits up in bed. Frankie sits up too. “I want you to kiss me,” Frankie says. “Anytime. I promise I want you to. Ending up with you—that’s the best thing that could’ve happened to me.”

“Oh,” Grace breathes. Frankie’s invitation makes her own feelings less shadowy. “Me too.” Leaving Nick settled her, and Frankie made her feel loved enough, and the game made life interesting, but this is so much bigger. It’s early morning, and her mouth is a little stale, but she kisses Frankie, blankets tangled around their legs, their hands finding each other. They linger, freed from the game’s pressure to rush. 

Frankie touches Grace’s lips when the kiss is over. Apparently this is something Frankie wants to do even without the excuse of new lipstick to play with. “Wouldn't it be great if it stormed this afternoon?” Frankie says. “We could come back here, spend the day like you said.” She smiles. “It would be very dramatic.” 

Grace is used to the poignancy of a hope not panning out. She fully expects to come back here but in the blaring sun. The universe always gives you something else, and you learn what it means, or doesn’t mean, when it happens. But after the first half of a surprisingly normal Sunday, caffeinated and newspaper-strewn, the skies open up. They laugh as they rush into the studio, rained-on but not soaked. Almost immediately, Frankie lies down on the bed and Grace follows. “You can take off my clothes,” Frankie says, the speed of her diction just this side of nervous chatter. “And your own, or I can do that, whatever you prefer, and—Grace? This is what you want?” 

Grace’s fingers stutter against the outer edges of Frankie’s many layers of clothes. “Yes,” she says. It’s the most luxurious _yes_ of her entire life. It sounds like the good ache forming between her legs. It feels easy, like how it takes hardly any time to undress despite all the fabric. 

There’s usually an abruptness to kissing, but that goes away in Frankie’s room. The kisses are insulated here: by the slash of the rain, the softness of the sheets, their bodies pressed together everywhere. Grace is surprised by Frankie’s hunger, had no idea what it would do to her to hear her beg. With every touch to Frankie’s breasts, and the tender expanse of skin beneath them, and the creased junction between torso and hip, Frankie asks for more and asks her to stay. Her pleas lack the fear of someone who thinks the other person will run; instead they put words to the value of what they promised: to stay put, to turn to each other, not as a last option but as the best choice. “I’m so glad you got in bed with me last night,” Frankie gasps when Grace starts to brush her fingers between her legs. 

“You invited me,” Grace murmurs. 

“You’re pretty good at saying yes.”

Grace rolls closer. At several points throughout the day she’d worried that she’d stumble through this first time, that the act wouldn’t live up to her intention. But she’s barely started fucking Frankie in earnest before Frankie stops begging in word form, replaces sentences with whimpers. “I love you,” Grace says, loose-lipped and happy. Frankie looks into Grace’s eyes and nods—in this moment, that's saying it back. When Frankie comes, her cries are thunder-dampened. Her body shudders against it, then rests. 

“You look lovely,” Grace says, and Frankie closes her eyes. “You look happy.” She eases herself off Frankie and stretches out beside her. 

“How do you want to be touched?” Frankie asks, and for a moment Grace is embarrassed she didn’t ask Frankie for the same information. The feeling doesn’t last long; she’s felt every moment of Frankie’s pleasure, and she aches. 

“Right here.” Grace pulls Frankie’s hand between her legs. “I’m—” Her face goes a little hot. “I’m ready.” In theory, she’d like to be caressed and teased in a thousand places, but there’s time for that later.

As Frankie touches her, she makes gentle little maneuvers, and Grace wonders where they come from—from the moment itself, or some planned for or hoped for imagining. Frankie uses her free arm to tilt Grace onto her back, grips Grace’s shoulder with her hand. They kiss, and Grace doesn’t have to remember to concentrate or remember to think about her part of the equation. It happens to her, it happens because of her, there’s nothing to force herself to think about or not think about. She doesn’t see herself; she sees Frankie and feels every point of contact, every perfect movement. She thinks suddenly about the raindrops, their speed and certainty, and that’s when she comes. 

“I’m probably going to keep writing in your planner,” Frankie says when they’ve caught their breath. They’re sprawled side-by-side. The rain shows no sign of stopping, and the room’s starting to get dark. “And by probably I mean definitely.”

“Good,” Grace says. “I’d expect nothing less.” She’ll keep the appointments, and schedule some of her own. It isn’t a game, but they’ll keep playing.


End file.
